If Music be the food of Love...

Question Results

Name this famous potion-drinking character: dreaming of marriage to the prince, this water nymph implores the witch Ježibaba to give her a potion that will make her human. It ends in tears.

Response:

Isolde from Wagner's Tristan and Isolde

Rusalka from Dvořák's Rusalka

Feedback:

Correct! Rusalka the water nymph falls in love with a prince and drinks a potion which gives her legs but takes away her voice. Things don't end happily…

Adina from Donizetti's L'elisir d'amore

Score 1 of 1

Question:

How many children did JS Bach father between the years of 1708 and 1742?

Response:

20

Feedback:

Correct! But only ten of them survived infancy

22

24

Score 0 of 1

Question:

Never one to stifle his own romantic affairs, which French composer said: ‘I love music passionately. And because I love it I try to free it from barren traditions that stifle it.’

Response:

Gabriel Fauré

Maurice Ravel

Feedback:

Answer: It was Debussy. The French composer left his wife in 1904 for the singer Emma Bardac - who some years earlier had had an affair with Gabriel Fauré.

Claude Debussy

Score 0 of 1

Question:

What did Richard Wagner and Cosima von Bülow call their first daughter conceived out of wedlock?

Response:

Isolde

Brünnhilde

Eva

Feedback:

Answer: Isolde. She was born in 1865. Another daughter, Eva was born in 1867 and the couple's first son, Siegfried, in 1869.

Score 1 of 1

Question:

Who wrote the opera Sir John in Love?

Response:

Ralph Vaughan Williams

Feedback:

Correct! The opera by Vaughan Williams is based on Shakespeare's play The Merry Wives of Windsor - and the John of the title is the famous bawd, Sir John Falstaff

Arnold Bax

Gustav Holst

Score 0 of 1

Question:

Which composer in the 1930s initially intended to keep his Romeo and Juliet alive, but later revised his plans and stuck to Shakespeare’s original plot?

Response:

Frederick Delius

Feedback:

Answer: Prokofiev thought better of changing the plot in the end…

Maurice Ravel

Sergey Prokofiev

Score 0 of 1

Question:

When the Duke of Andria and Donna Maria D’Avalos were indulging in a little extra-marital pleasure in 1586, they had the misfortune of being caught in flagrante by her soon-to-be-murderous composer husband. And he was…?

Response:

Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina

Tomás Luis de Victoria

Feedback:

Answer: Gesualdo. The jealous composer then displayed the bodies outside his palace. Being a nobleman he was immune to prosecution - but he still fled to escape from relatives seeking revenge

Carlo Gesulado

Score 0 of 1

Question:

A hirsute beast from a classic 1933 film becomes infatuated with the subject of a famous Vermeer Dutch painting. Name the 1994 opera in which this unlikely scenario occurs.

Response:

The Second Mrs Kong

The Pearl Earring Fisher

Beast and the Beauty

Feedback:

Answer: Harrison Birtwistle's The Second Mrs Kong mixes modern stories, ancient mythology with a good dose of history too.

Score 0 of 1

Question:

Which British composer died of pneumonia when his wife locked him out of the house after a late night out?

Response:

Hubert Parry

Henry Purcell

Orlando Gibbons

Feedback:

Answer: Poor Purcell probably died of pneumonia after returning from the theatre one night and finding he was locked out.

Free Newsletter

Email: *

By clicking on the 'Sign Up!' button below, you are agreeing to Classical-music.com's terms & conditions. You can opt-out at any time.

We use cookies to improve your experience of our website. Cookies perform functions like recognising you each time you visit and delivering advertising messages that are relevant to you. Read more here